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ADAM
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ADAM: Dinner tonight? My treat.
It took her about seventeen years, at least, to reply. I was, of course, watching my phone the entire time, a glass of wine on the table next to me and some mindless sports show on the TV.
Finally, my phone buzzed.
Katie: Damn, that sounds good. And hell yeah, your treat. You’re the rich guy here, not me. Seven?
I grinned wide enough that I thought I felt my cheeks cracking.
Adam: Seven sounds perfect. I’ll see you downstairs.
I glanced at my watch, noticed that it was only five now, and hustled into the bathroom. I didn’t necessarily need a shower, but I did need to do something to take up the next two hours, and a shower was as good an activity as anything else.
Besides, the shower was where I’d always done my best thinking. And right now, I had plenty of things to think about.
I got out of my clothes so quickly that I thought I could have won some sort of award—if there was an award for that—and stepped into the immediately hot water, sighing in pleasure. Staying long-term in a hotel was a pain in the butt, and I’d never understood the friends I had who actually lived in hotels. It was the height of inconvenience. You didn’t get your own space, you were caught in a little box, and there were always people walking past your front door, unless you were lucky enough to have the penthouse.
Plus you had to deal with an elevator ride and the rest of the hotel any time you left your room or were going back.
But seriously, the immediate hot water? heavenly. Even in my penthouse in the city—which was, I’ll note, at the top of the very best building in the entire city—didn’t have such quick access to hot water. Every time I turned the shower on in this place, I reveled in the ability to get right into the shower.
I know, weird. But seriously, you take your pleasure where you can get it, am I right?
I inhaled deeply, feeling the hot, thick fog enter my lungs, and smiled softly.
Yep, immediate hot water definitely made up for some things, in terms of staying in this hotel for so long.
So did the fact that I was only two floors away from Katie Walters at all times.
No, I wasn’t supposed to be seen going to her room, and she wasn’t supposed to be seen coming to mine—though honestly, I still didn’t see the big deal—but there was something about knowing that she was right there that made me feel...
I frowned. What was that? Secure? No, it was something more than that. Safe? Definitely not. The girl was amazing, but she wasn’t exactly going to save me if I was being held at gunpoint or something.
Satisfied. That was what it was. I liked knowing that she was so close. I liked knowing that she was within easy reach if I wanted to talk to her about something in the middle of the night or get breakfast with her on a Sunday morning. I liked knowing that I could text her and suggest dinner, and we could have gone down to one of the restaurants within the next five minutes, if she’d been available.
Weird. I’d never been that attached to a girl before, and I’d certainly never wanted one around all the time. I wasn’t completely sure how I felt about this... dependence? No. Need?
No.
Addiction.
I found the word and nodded to myself. That was exactly what it felt like. She’d gotten into my blood and somehow made the entire world richer. Better. More colorful.
And I wanted more of it. Lots more.
I felt myself starting to get hard, my hips rocking at the thought of wanting more of her, and abruptly cut those thoughts off. That was not what this shower was for.
This shower was for thinking.
No, not thinking about her.
Thinking about the case. Because if we were going to have dinner, I wanted to be able to multi-task. Talk about life... and the case. Figure out how we were going to get this one wrapped up.
I was tired of knowing that my company was still losing money. Sick of knowing that someone out there was taking advantage of us. I wanted to find them and get them out of the company’s systems, pronto.
And there was a weird, primal part of me that wanted to be the guy who figured it all out, just to see Katie’s face when I did it.
So right. Business. The case. The guys who’d been assigned to me, so to speak.
As far as Joseph and Arthur went, I didn’t have much more than I’d had right after we had dinner together. I knew slightly more about their childhoods, thanks to random chats in the office, but they weren’t exactly taking me into their confidence about anything deeper than that.
Not yet.
I still had a feeling they were working together. It didn’t make sense for Arthur to be in this company if he didn’t need the money. Yeah, he’d told me that he wanted to do something to keep his mind busy and keep himself from getting bored, but if that was true, why didn’t he do something more rewarding? Something that was a personal dream of his, rather than a personal dream of mine?
I knew a lot of people that I classed as workaholics. I had never met anyone who would go to work for someone else’s company just for kicks if they didn’t have a specific reason to do it. Granted, in my circles, that reason would probably be corporate espionage. Stealing secrets.
In Arthur’s, it made sense if that reason was stealing money.
Not for him, but for Joseph, who had straight-up admitted that he had too many bills and nothing to pay them with, and that the bills were getting even worse now that he and his wife were separated.
I mean, it was almost too perfect.
Wait.
It was almost too perfect. The pieces were so well-fitted that it was like they’d been designed to fit together.
“Shit,” I muttered, seeing the thing from an entirely new viewpoint.
Was it too easy? Too obvious? Could it be that they’d made the entire thing up, for reasons that I couldn’t possibly imagine?
Wait.
Did they know who I was? And if they did, did they know why I was here? Could it be that they’d heard around the office that Katie and I were there to investigate something, and had decided to have a little fun with us?
No way. No freaking way. We’d been incredibly careful with that particular secret, and even the guy we’d just been investigating hadn’t known why we were looking into his personal records. We hadn’t exactly told him that we were looking for a thief and had thought it was him, and in doing our research for that, had happened upon the discovery that he’d faked his college transcripts.
The only other people who knew were Samuel, James, Chase, and the lawyer, and none of them would have told anyone else. They were all very committed to finding the thief, because the fact that he—or she—was in their office looked very bad for them.
There was no way our secret could have gotten out.
I was being paranoid.
Still, once the idea was in my head, it was awfully hard to shake.
I put it on my list of things to consider the next time I saw the duo, and then added one more thing. Maybe I should make sure to have Katie with me the next time I saw them. She had more experience with reading people than I did—at least in the criminal sense—and she might be able to see something I hadn’t seen.
She had, after all, already brought up the point that the guys might know who I was. I’d never even considered it, but she’d seen it immediately and told me to be careful.
If they were playing games, she’d be able to see it. I was positive she would.
***
BY THE TIME SEVEN ROLLED around, I’d gone all out with the case, writing down list after list of things to do and thoughts I’d had, and collecting all the pages into a single folder for easy access.
No, I didn’t want to work on the case tonight. I wanted to have dinner with Katie and try to make her forget about work for a little bit. But once I’d realized how rewarding it would be to be the one to turn the bad guy over to Katie—an offering from an admirer, I thought with a laugh—I hadn’t been able to get it out of my mind.
Call me a caveman if you must, but I wanted to be the one to figure it out. I wanted to lay the answer at her feet like I was from some freaking Arthurian legend. A knight giving his lady a gift.
Yeah, it was corny and stupid and completely immature. I also knew, from how much it had resonated with me the moment I realized it, that it was exactly what I was doing. And I didn’t even feel ashamed of it.
“Is this really where you want to eat?” a voice just to my left asked casually.
I jumped and glanced down, finding Katie herself at my elbow, and then looked up and realized that I’d managed to get to one of the main restaurants without any real effort. I’d been so caught up in thinking about her that I hadn’t been paying attention to where I was going.
“Honestly...” I said, thinking about it. “No. I’m not in the mood for fancy tonight. What did you have in mind?”
She gave me an extremely pleased grin. “Pizza and red wine. You game?”
Pizza and red wine sounded... perfect. Way more my style. “Absolutely. Lead on, my lady.”
She gave me a weird look at that comment but didn’t hesitate, and a second later I was following her down the hall into a maze of restaurants and shops that I hadn’t even known existed.
“This place is like an entire mall living under the hotel,” I said, surprised. “How did you know this was all down here?”
“Well, I studied the hotel’s brochure, to start with,” she said sarcastically. She stopped at a dimly lit restaurant, checked the sign—Antonio’s—and then yanked the door open. “You’d know about it too if you bothered to look through that sort of stuff.”
“I,” I told her, arching my brows, “have been working on a very important investigation. I haven’t had time for brochures. And if you have, maybe it means you haven’t been working as hard as I have.”
A loud laugh exploded out of her mouth, and I grinned in self-congratulations.
I’d never heard that laugh before. But now that I had, I wanted to hear it again.
A lot.
***
KATIE PUT HER WINEGLASS down and gave me the grin to go with that laugh.
“It’s easy,” she drawled. “I say something that may or may not be true. You guess whether I’m lying or not. If you guess right, I take a drink. If you guess wrong, you take a drink. And then we switch.”
“Unfair,” I responded. “You’re a private investigator. Your entire job is to lie and get people to believe you.”
“My entire job,” she argued, “is to solve cases. The lying is just a side effect.”
“A side effect that you’re incredibly good at, or you wouldn’t be such a good private investigator,” I pointed out.
She shrugged. “That’s the chance you’ll have to take, I suppose. Besides, you’re the CEO of a major company. Surely you’re not saying that you’re honest all the time. During every meeting and every deal.”
She lifted her eyebrows in question, and I shrugged.
“I have to give you that one. If I always told the truth the first time, I wouldn’t be a very good businessman.”
She took another sip of wine, smiling behind the glass. “Just as I thought. In that case, Mr. Miller, I’d say we’re well matched.”
Mr. Miller. Shit, I liked the sound of that. I liked the way it sounded on her tongue.
I leaned forward, getting as close to her as I could with the table in my way. “Is it terrible if I like it when you call me Mr. Miller?”
She leaned in as well, the corner of her mouth pressing back a bit in a smirk. “Why’s that?”
“I don’t know. I guess because it sounds sort of naughty.”
“And what if I just called you Miller?” She breathed out.
Fuck. My cock jumped up to attention, and I realized that I’d already had way too much to drink. The combination of Katie and her calling me something that no one else did...
“I like it.”
She sat back, suddenly all business. “Then consider it your nickname for the night. Now, Miller, who’s going first in our little game?”
“I’ll go first,” I said with a sly smile.
I already had my first lie thought up. And I didn’t think she’d have a prayer of figuring out whether it was true or not.
“I’ve had a crush on you since the moment I saw you.”
